Interview: Jeffrey Steefel on LOTRO Mines of Moria, Part One

So how do you pitch LotRO to someone who hasn't heard of it, or MMO players who haven't yet tried it?

Well first of all, if they haven't ever tried an MMO before, I say to them we built this game with a more casual audience in mind, and that this does not have to be the all-consuming change your life, live in your house and be in front of your computer 50 hours a week game. In fact increasingly, we spend more and more time making sure the game is something you can play for an hour at a time if you want to. You can jump in and play by yourself any time if you want to, you don't have to get with a large group of people, though that's of course always an option too.

The first thing I'd say is that LotRO is intended for people to participate in different ways. You don't have to be that lifer to play the game, although we certainly have lots of those folks playing as well.

The second thing is that the folks who'd probably be attracted to the game have probably seen the movies and perhaps even read the books. This is just a natural extension of that. If they enjoyed reading about this place and all these characters and they enjoyed seeing Peter Jackson's vision of it, then it's really fun just to be in that world. We've created the opportunity for them to do that, even if they're just walking around and talking to people and enjoying seeing the places they saw in the movies or read about in the fiction.

There's that, and then there's also a lot of really interesting story in the game, and it's an extension to the stories they already know. Also, our audience is more casual and slightly older than the average MMO player.

I've played it a bit, you know, I haven't played up to a level 50 character yet, but as I've worked through the books, I notice a lot of attention to...I'm not a canonical expert, but...

You're not a lorkie.

Definitely not a lorkie. But as I'm going through, some of it seems extremely...the fidelity to the books is higher than I'd expected. Given the amount of content you're juggling, obviously a lot of it has to be manufactured to fit the game since it's got to be a game first and foremost. What's the vetting process you use to put all that in and yet maintain a distinctive Tolkien flavor?

It's a couple layers of things. First of all, we make sure that anything we're literally doing, whether it's from the books, whether it's a character, whether it's Gandalf, whether it's the Shire, or anything that's specifically described in the books, if we're going to represent it in the game, we make really sure that we've read everything we possibly can that Tolkien wrote to understand what his intent was. In some cases it's very explicit, so that's why Gandalf tends to look like Gandalf in every game, movie, and play, whereas some other characters are a little less well described.

For things that were explicitly described, we make sure that we satisfy that description to the best of our capabilities. We also make sure that if it's anything iconic, Tolkien Enterprises takes a look at it and makes sure it feels right to them.